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It is commonly noted that the United States and Iran are fighting an “asymmetric war,” but it is less widely understood what this means.

The phrase does not mean merely that the two sides are unequal in armed might. (Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s boast that “this is not a fair fight, and that’s on purpose, our capabilities are overwhelming compared to what Iran’s are” is a truism and beside the point.)

Rather, it means that the two sides are, in a way, fighting different wars—that the two sides have different strengths and that the militarily weaker side is mustering its own type of strength to exploit the militarily stronger side’s vulnerabilities.

In this case, the U.S. (along with Israel) is blowing up a lot of Iranian structures with great power and precision. Meanwhile, Iran is blocking traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil passes, thus hurling much of the globe’s economy and markets into panic.

The war’s outcome may be decided not in terms of which side unleashes the most firepower but rather which side outwaits the other in its tolerance of pain (as defined in the several ways pain is being inflicted, the most decisive of which we don’t yet know).

Trump had thought there would be no need to wait for victory, much less outwait Iran’s challenge. He hoped, and said so publicly, that Iran would be Venezuela redux—knock off the top leader and the regime would fall, to be replaced either by more pragmatic underlings or by throngs of “the Iranian people” taking over the seats of power. (It turned out there were no pragmatic underlings—or, if there were some, they too were killed by U.S. or Israeli bombs—and the people lack the guns and organization to take power. But that’s another story.

It turns out the Iranian regime has hung on much longer than Trump expected; U.S. intelligence agencies report that it’s nowhere near on the verge of collapsing. Still, in pursuing their asymmetric strategy, Tehran’s commanders made one miscalculation. In response to the U.S.-Israeli attack, they fired some drones and missiles not only at Israel and at American military bases in the region but also at civilian targets in Arab states that host those U.S.........

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